Dear Friend,
The longest federal government shutdown in American history has finally ended. The fallout: flights were delayed or canceled, families turned to food banks to put meals on the table, and countless federal employees worked without seeing their paychecks hit their accounts. And it makes you wonder: what was all of this really about?
For starters, it should be noted that the only two people in the Nevada Congressional delegation who voted to keep the government open at every chance they had were Senator Cortez Masto and myself. Meanwhile, House Democrats voted to shut down the government 62 days ago on September 19, and Senate Democrats voted 15 times until November 10 to keep the government shut down. In all, this will go down as the longest shutdown in the history of the United States at 43 days.
Throughout that time, my offices both in Reno and Washington have remained open and my staff and I continued working. Now that the government has reopened, we expect for agency cooperation with our constituent services to resume at full force.
However, the impacts of the Democrat-led shutdown can’t be overlooked. Even with the government now reopened, air travel disruptions continue from the forced flight cancelations, and air traffic controllers and TSA agents are still returning to work. We expect all impacted federal employees to be fully caught up on their backpay this week, but that doesn’t diminish the strains felt over the last six weeks.
We have learned over the years that shutdowns are expensive, and the U.S. GDP is now expected to shrink 0.8% for this quarter, with roughly $55 billion in lost output to the economy. In Nevada alone, the impact is estimated at $606 million in lost gross state product per month, with consumer spending falling by about $224 million monthly due to lost wages.
So, have we finally learned our lesson now that shutdowns don’t produce anything except proving chaos is wildly expensive, disruptive, and should never be used again as a political weapon? Every chance I have to vote against shutting down the government, I will take.
SHUTDOWN CULPRIT:
THE HEALTHCARE RED HERRING
As of 2025, Nevada has 3.2 million residents, yet just over 3% (95,700 people) receive Affordable Care Act premium tax credits. Prior to 2021, ACA tax credit eligibility was generally restricted to households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL).
During the pandemic, enhanced premium tax credits were introduced, expanding eligibility to households above the original threshold. Specifically, it removed the 400% FPL income cap and reduced the percentage of income individuals must pay for coverage, ensuring no one pays more than 8.5% of their income and providing larger subsidies across all income levels. At the time, it made sense because an unprecedented health crisis demanded extraordinary measures. But now it’s 2025, the pandemic is over, yet these emergency subsidies continue, often reaching people who rarely use their coverage or don’t even know they have it.
This administration came into office promising to tackle waste, fraud, and abuse, an effort that shouldn’t be controversial, but rather a bipartisan commitment to accountability and a more efficient government.
Since the enhanced credits were introduced, ACA marketplace enrollment has more than doubled from 11.4 million in 2021 to 24.3 million in 2025. As a result, federal spending on these subsidies jumped $27 billion, from $71 billion to $98 billion. Yet only about half of enrollees actually use their coverage. The rest, an estimated 12 million phantom enrollees, remain on the rolls because of automatic renewals, outdated data, or confusion about their plans.
It’s important to highlight that insurance companies are the main beneficiaries of this system. They collect federal payments for every name on the books, whether anyone actually uses the coverage, giving them little incentive to fix a problem they profit from.
And yet, Democrat leadership shut down the government over tax credits they created and unilaterally set to expire, making the crisis entirely of their own making.
Originally, the enhanced credits were intended to help lower-income families. During the pandemic, the income requirement was temporarily removed to address widespread uncertainty. Today, however, most beneficiaries are not lower-income households. The Congressional Budget Office estimates making these subsidies permanent would cost over $400 billion over the next decade, but the majority of this spending flows to high-income households who would have purchased insurance anyway. Meanwhile, the low-income families these subsidies were meant to protect see little change because their premiums were already heavily subsidized.
So here we are, nearly six years later, and a completely partisan healthcare plan with almost no bipartisan input that not a single Republican supported is still failing, no matter how much money is thrown at it.
Lowering healthcare costs should be a priority, but throwing money at a broken system will not fix it. If we truly want to help those this program was created to protect, we must confront inflated enrollment numbers and hold insurance companies accountable for get-rich-quick schemes.
At the end of the day, no amount of subsidies can save a system being exploited and diluted from its original intention. What it all boils down to is bad policy gaslighting at an unprecedented level and another thinly veiled attempt by Democrats to nationalize healthcare, all while asking taxpayers to foot the bill. No thank you.
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